Kawhi Leonard scoring for the LA Clippers in January 2021 (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
Kawhi Leonard scoring for the LA Clippers in January 2021 (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
In 2014, Steve Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers for a then-record $2 billion, rescuing the basketball team from the clutches of Donald Sterling, who had been forced to sell after a recording was released in which he made racist comments. Sterling, long known as a West Coast doppelgänger of Donald Trump, was the kind of owner who held his team as merely another asset, content to enrich himself but hesitant to spend much money on it, even if it made the team uncompetitive. NBA teams have made for fruitful investments: in 2000, the most valuable team in the league was valued at $395 million; as of early 2025, the average NBA team was worth about $4.6 billion.
Ballmer, who was Microsoft’s CEO from 2000 to 2014, spent freely on the Clippers. He was well positioned to: he has reaped unimaginable spoils over the last two decades of big tech bloat and is now the eighth richest man in the world, with a net worth around $166 billion.
Last September, the podcaster Pablo Torre reported that the Clippers’ star player, Kawhi Leonard, had signed an unusual endorsement deal in 2022 with Aspiration, a tree-planting financial firm that sponsored the Clippers in the early 2020s. Aspiration would pay Leonard $28 million over four years, in exchange for which he ‘literally did nothing’. The contract would be terminated, however, if he stopped playing for the Clippers. Meanwhile, Ballmer had invested $50 million in Aspiration. Together, this suggests that the Clippers may have used Aspiration as an intermediary to pay their star player extra money under the table, an arrangement that would breach the NBA salary cap.
Although the NBA is a corporate entity that epitomises the runaway glut of hyper-capitalism (billionaire owners, multimillionaire players), it is strictly regulated to ensure competitive practice. The salary cap is the spine of the league’s regulatory regime, designed to prevent the richest teams from simply buying up the top players at unmatchable salaries (English football fans can only look on in envy or despair; the Premier League clubs recently voted against introducing a salary cap). Ballmer remains the world’s richest professional sports team owner.
The NBA has hired a white-shoe law firm to conduct an investigation into Torre’s claims. If Ballmer, Leonard or the Clippers are found to have violated the salary cap rules, they could face fines, nullified contracts or the forfeiture of draft picks. While the NBA appears to be taking these potential offences seriously, much of the legacy sports media has been slower to come around. Hours after Torre’s story broke, Shams Charania, ESPN’s ‘senior NBA insider’, told viewers that no explicit wrongdoing had been found in Torre’s reporting and that no-work endorsement contracts are more common than Torre suggests. The ESPN host Stephen A. Smith described Ballmer as ‘pretty hurt’. Ballmer soon sat down with another ESPN reporter for an unconfrontational interview. Joe Budden, another podcaster, described Torre’s pursuit of the story as a ‘corny’ non-issue.
In other words, the legacy sports media don’t see allegations of fraud as part of their remit, which tends to be restricted to such topics as player performance, roster melodramas and coaching strategy.
Sports leagues and the media companies that cover them are interdependent. Channels like ESPN pay their ‘insiders’ and ‘analysts’ millions of dollars to feed an interminable access-driven content churn. Critical, investigative sports journalism – work that takes seriously the political economy of professional sport – jeopardises this process.
Professional leagues are sprawling multinational corporations grossing tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, employing tens of thousands of workers and serving hundreds of millions of consumers. But the sports media shrink professional sport, in all its material totality, to a mere game.
As with sport, so with politics. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Joan Didion described the way political journalists ‘are willing, in exchange for “access”, to transmit the images their sources wish transmitted … They are willing, in exchange for colourful details around which a “reconstruction” can be built … to present these images not as a story the campaign wants told but as fact.’
‘Trump is such an accessible president,’ Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, said in October. ‘Any time the camera is around, it can turn into a press conference … President Obama almost never responded to shouted questions.’ Journalists are rarely so candid about their preferences, but access is a priority for all political reporters and their editors. Trump once described the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman as his ‘psychiatrist’ (‘I love being with her,’ he is reported to have said). A former Politico reporter once told me that the site’s fealty lies with neither liberals nor conservatives but with ‘the inside’.